A Starting Nine of Exclusive Releases From the Baseball Card Vandals

If you don’t know the Baseball Card Vandals, then I guess you don’t know the most important artists of our time.

For so many people growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, collecting baseball cards wasn’t just some hobby – it was a way of life.

The sweet sound of a pack’s plastic wrapper ripping open, the smell of a fresh pack of cards, sifting through the bounty to find just one card you could put away into a binder and stare at for hours – all of it was equivalent to a religious experience for any kid obsessed with baseball.

And though it might not have been the main reason for collecting baseball cards, many of us thought a collection would one day be our ticket to untold riches. Someday, someone would recognize my collection of Cleveland Indians cards and buy it for a million dollars because this unimaginably rich benefactor, like me, could appreciate the meticulous organization of my cards and the sheer number of Jim Thome rookie cards I had accrued.

But here’s the thing: thanks to somewhere around six billion brands producing cards and all of them being mass-produced into oblivion, almost all the cards from this era are now completely worthless. Just pieces of cardboard no more valuable than the soggy Amazon box sitting on your porch in the rain.

But Beau and Bryan Abbott – the Baseball Card Vandals – have rescued these cards from their purgatory and given them new life, thanks to irreverent senses of humor (that means they make good poop jokes) and some permanent markers. And because they’re extremely cool dudes, they’re debuting a new starting nine of vandalized 1970 Topps cards right here on Robot Butt.